But how do these attacks manifest themselves, and what are the most common cyber threats to organisations today?

In this post, we explore five of the most common cyber attacks and discuss what you can do to protect your organisation.

1) Phishing

What is phishing?

Phishing is a form of social engineering where a criminal hacker tries to trick the user into clicking a malicious link or downloading an infected attachment or divulging sensitive or confidential information.

Types of phishing

There are many types of phishing, including:

Vishing: Voice phishing or ‘vishing’ is a type of phishing conducted by phone. Most vishing attempts try to get the victim to reveal information like PINs, payment card details and passwords. Criminals then use those details to access online accounts to steal information or money.

Smishing: SMS phishing or ‘smishing’ is becoming a more popular form of phishing, partly because we increasingly rely on smartphones in both our work and personal lives.

Spear phishing: Spear phishing is a targeted form of phishing attack – usually conducted to seek financial gain or obtain insider information – where cyber criminals adapt their methods to reach a specific victim. Spear phishing attacks are rarely random – instead, they are most often conducted by perpetrators seeking financial gain or insider information.

2) Ransomware

What is ransomware?

Ransomware is a type of malicious software designed to deny access to files until, or threaten to publish the victim’s data unless, a ransom is paid (although there is no guarantee that access will be restored, or that the criminal hacker will destroy the data).

3) DDoS Attacks

What is a DDoS attack?

A DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack attempts to disrupt normal web traffic and take a site offline by overwhelming a system, server or network with more access requests than it can handle.

DDoS attacks typically serve one of two purposes:

1) An act of revenge against an organisation.

2) A distraction that allows cyber criminals to break into the organisation while it focuses on restoring its website.

How to prevent DDoS attacks

The reputational and financial damage as the result of the service unavailability inflicted by a successful DDoS attack can be severe. Therefore, preventing or at least quickly countering DDoS attacks can be critical for your organisation’s survival.

Regularly testing your IT infrastructure is paramount to keeping your systems secure, and is something any organisation should consider as part of its cyber security strategy.

4) Computer viruses

What is a computer virus?

A computer virus is a type of malicious code or program written to alter the way a computer operates. Much like a flu virus, it is designed to spread from one computer to another (but without the user’s knowledge) by:

5) Attack vectors

Attack vectors are used to gain access to a computer or network in order to infect it with malware or harvest data. There are four main types of attack vector:

Drive-by

A drive-by cyber attack targets a user through their Internet browser, installing malware on their computer as soon as they visit an infected website.

It can also happen when a user visits a legitimate website that has been compromised by criminal hackers, either by infecting them directly or redirecting them to a malicious site.

MITM (man in the middle)

An MITM attack is where an attacker alters the communication between two users, impersonating both victims to manipulate them and gain access to their data. The users are not aware that they are communicating with an attacker rather than each other.

Zero-day attack

Outdated (unpatched) software often contains vulnerabilities that criminal hackers can use to bring entire systems down. Where they exploit a vulnerability made public before a patch or solution has been rolled out by the developer, this is referred to as a zero-day attack.

Patch management is one of the five basic cyber security controls contained in the UK government’s Cyber Essentials scheme.